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History Makers: Anne Frank

The diary of a young girl, forced into hiding by the Nazis, offers a unique insight into life for thousands of persecuted Jews during World War II. Her moving diary has touched millions since her death...

ANNE FRANK VOICE OF THE HOLOCAUST

DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL Anne’s diary is a beautiful account of life as a teenager

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Four policemen stormed into a canal-side warehouse in western Amsterdam one warm summer’s day in August 1944. Inside, cowering among a network of rooms that filled the three-storey building, they found eight Jews, who had been using the property as a hiding place in an attempt to elude the murderous attentions of the city’s Nazi rulers.

One of the terrified captives frogmarched out of the building that morning had left behind, in the chaos of her arrest, a small diary, bound in red and white-chequered cloth, as well as exercise books and sheets of paper. Her name was Anne Frank. She was a mere 15 years old, and the thousands of words she had recorded in those pages would make hers one of the most celebrated, and tragic, life stories of the century.

Anne had first caught sight of that little redand-white book in a shop window while out walking with her father, Otto, just over two years earlier. Noting her admiration for the book, and with her 13th birthday fast approaching, Otto had secretly returned to the shop to buy it as a present for his youngest daughter.

MARCH 1933 FLEEING PERSECUTION

A matter of weeks after Adolf Hitler’s fiercely anti-Semitic Nazi Party wins power in Germany, Anne Frank’s family flees her hometown of Frankfurt for the Netherlands (ABOVE L-R: Margot, Anne and their father Otto).